But if there were such a test in Massachusetts, it would feature an IQ ceiling, not a floor. . . .

Plus: “Of course, DuBois is positioning herself as a crusader against sex-based harassment and patriarchy. But attitudes like hers—which treat women as excessively fragile beings, and which posit that female ‘dignity’ is diminished by even so slight an association with sex work as walking under a door that says ‘hooker’—just props up old-fashioned and patriarchal ideas about sex and gender.”

It would be easy to write an argument for restoring the patriarchy based solely on feminists’ statements about how weak, fragile, and stupid women are.

From the blog site Watt's Up With That, by Mr Anthony Watts, 14 March 2018.

Here is the lede plus three:

Bjørn Lomborg writes on his Facebook page of a reverse hockey stick graph, one that is certainly inconvenient to the gloom and doom message of climate alarmists who try to link regular weather events to climate. So, Lomborg plays their game, and the results are surprising.

Fewer and fewer people die from climate-related natural disasters

This is clearly opposite of what you normally hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds and better accessibility (the CNN effect). For instance, for Denmark, the database only shows events starting from 1976.

Instead, look at the number of dead per year, which is much harder to fudge. Given that these numbers fluctuate enormously from year to year (especially in the past, with huge droughts and floods in China), they are here presented as averages of each decade (1920-29, 1930-39 etc, with last decade as 2010-17). The data is from the most respected global database, the International Disaster Database, http://emdat.be/emdat_db/. There is some uncertainty about complete reporting from early decades, which is why this graph starts in 1920, and if anything this uncertainly means the graph *underestimates* the reduction in deaths.

This doesn't prove that climate change doesn't exist, but it does suggest that in this more modern era we have more money and more infrastructure and more tools to aid in recovery from climate based disasters.

Friday's firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, based on a report from the Office of Professional Responsibility, is only the beginning of what is likely to be the most explosive series of revelations in American history.

Forget Watergate. It will be the distant past once the Inspector General's reports—there apparently will be more than one—start to come out. This will be the "Gate of Gates."

From the FBI and across the intelligence agencies an astonishing number of people are going to find themselves accused, one can safely predict at this point, of some atrocious behavior in a free republic. And it will not just be the small change of Peter Strzok (the dimwitted director of counter-intelligence) and his gal pal Lisa Page. It will include—on one level or another—James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice and, almost inevitably, Barack Obama, not to mention others known and unknown.

Maybe Roger Simon is right, but maybe the Swamp will protect all those people named above. Only time will tell. That said, since we didn't really get a fire break with Mr Andrew McCabe, perhaps the fire needs to consume more territory before we can get it under control. At the end of the day it is about cleansing and strengthening the Republic.

Personally, I wish he had gone quietly, with his pension in tact, but with the word out to others that it was time to stand down. Didn't seem to happen.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's disastrous decision to throw open an essentially defenseless western Europe to hordes of military-age males from the Islamic ummah will go down in history as one of Christendom's greatest blunders, either a triumph of wishful childless-feminist thinking or a malevolent act of epic proportions. So this statement by new Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, while welcome, is way too little, and far too late:

New Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Islam does not belong to Germany, and set out hardline immigration policies in his first major interview since being sworn in this week, as he sought to see off rising far-right challengers.

Note that in the European media -- and soon enough in the American -- any conservative defender of tradition is now labeled "far-right." As I've often said on Twitter (@dkahanerules), on the Left, "treason is the highest form of patriotism."

His comments put him on a collision course with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who on Friday reiterated her long-held view that Islam was a part of Germany, even if the country was traditionally characterized by Christianity and Judaism.

“Islam does not belong to Germany,” Seehofer, a member of Merkel’s CSU Bavarian allies who are further to the right than her own Christian Democrats (CDU), told Bild newspaper in an interview published on Friday. Seehofer said he would push through a “master plan for quicker deportations” and classify more states as ‘safe’ countries of origin, which would make it easier to deport failed asylum seekers.

Seehofer is particularly keen to show his party is tackling immigration ahead of Bavaria’s October regional election, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is expected to enter that state assembly. “Of course the Muslims living here do belong to Germany,” Seehofer told Bild, but added that Germany should not give up its own traditions or customs, which have Christianity at their heart.

“My message is: Muslims need to live with us, not next to us or against us,” he said.

So, what does Germany, with a declining birthrate, look like in twenty years?

For sure, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is correct in saying that (for the experiment to succeed) the Muslim immigrants need to live with the Germans and not next to them or against them.(CSU)
Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

In August 2002, less than a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times n a CIA secret prison in Thailand. Seven months later, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was tortured in the same manner 183 times.

Other suspected terrorists rounded up during the US global war on terrorism were subjected to mock executions and threats to rape and murder family members. They were placed in stress positions, which included being kept in coffin-like boxes for days on end. They were deprived of sleep (some for as many 180 straight hours), physically assaulted, and forced to take ice-cold baths. One prisoner died from hypothermia during an interrogation. Detainees experienced severe psychological and behavioral problems, including hallucinations, paranoia, and suicidal actions.

In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, detainees were subjected to “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment and “the evidence of this is overwhelming and incontrovertible.”

In the 15 years since this happened not one person has even been held responsible for these heinous acts — and this week a key architect of the CIA’s torture program, Gina Haspel, was nominated to become the director of the agency. If she gets the job it will be, in effect, an acknowledgment by the federal government and Congress that those who broke US and international law by torturing prisoners did nothing wrong. If the rule of law means anything in America, that can’t be allowed to happen.

To me the problem is that if Ms Haspel doesn't meet our standards, then who does? Do we bring in someone from the outside? Do we recycle a previous office holder?

If you are sick and tired of professors indoctrinating students in politicized classes that teach nothing of any use in real life, and hate the idea that tenure immunizes them from accountability, the next decade or so is going to provide some relief. The reckoning is coming, as shocked professors at a University of Wisconsin campus just discovered. The higher education bubble that Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has forecast to burst has just popped in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

It turns out that you can’t earn a living teaching subjects that students aren’t that interested in. Even if you have tenure. Colleen Flaherty writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

…the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point announced its plan to cut 13 majors -- including those in anchor humanities departments such as English and history and all three of the foreign languages offered -- and, with them, faculty jobs. Tenured professors may well lose their positions.

Further down we learn who died:

Here is the list of the departments being closed at Wisconsin, Stevens Point.

American studies,

art (excluding graphic design),

English (excluding English for teacher certification),

French,

geography,

geoscience,

German,

history (excluding social science for teacher certification),

music literature,

philosophy,

political science,

sociology

Spanish.

I have a BS, and a Masters focused on Management in the Aerospace area, but still, there are some majors there I have enjoyed dabbling in, including History, Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology. There are things to be learned in those fields. For instance, there is that old bromide, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana) I would suggest Venezuela is an example of that.

May Slams Corbyn Over His Refusal to Condemn Russia.

This is from Guido Fawkes, at his Blog, Order-Order, on 14 March 2018. It has embedded video of the Prime Minister condemning the Opposition Leader.

Here is the lede plus one:

Theresa May slammed Jeremy Corbyn for his lack of support over the Russian spy poisoning crisis. The Prime Minister told Jezza:

There is a consensus across the backbenches of this House. I am only sorry that this consesnsus does not go as far as the Right Honourable Gentleman, who could have taken the opportunity as the UK government has done to condemn the cuplability of the Russian state.

But, back to Jessa (Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn). He has refused to point a finger at Russian President Putin in the attempted murders of two Russian Expatriates and the incidental poisoning of a British Police Office.

There is this, further down the blog post:

In this type situation Guido would normally expect the leader of the oppostion’s spin doctor to back pedal in the Lobby briefing huddle that follows, he would “clarify” and nuance the wording. Emphasise the more conventional parts of the argument to soften the inevitably hostile headlines coming tomorrow. When that spin-doctor is Seumas Milne however it seems there was to be no compromising on Putin’s line. Under intense questioning he refused to say that the Labour Party’s leader accepted the Russian state was at fault:

The government has access to information and intelligence on this matter which others don‘t. However, also there is a history in relation to weapons of mass destruction and intelligence which is problematic, to put it mildly. So, I think the right approach is to seek the evidence to follow international treaties, particularly in relation to prohibitive chemical weapons.

The reference to "a history" refers to the run up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, when the UK supported the United States Government regarding accusations of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. There was, first, The Butler Review, and then in 2009, The Chilcot Inquiry.♠

There you have it. The Labour Party in the United Kingdom is officially in President Putin's pocket. There is a lot more evidence for that than there ever was for President Trump being in collusion with the Russians.

Regards — Cliff

♠ President George H. W. Bush said, "I count my blessings for the fact I don't have to go into that pit that John Major stands in, nose-to-nose with the opposition, all yelling at each other."♥ For those hoping to see Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrap up soon, the Chilcot Report started in 2009, with its appointment by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and ended in 2016 with a public statement by Sir John Chilcot. Speaking of sinecures.